


Life Grander than that Imagined

by Staymay5



Series: A Song of Oneshots and Drabbles [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gendry loves his Lady Arya, Possible Cannon Divergence, Row row row your boat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-29 20:38:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10143521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Staymay5/pseuds/Staymay5
Summary: Gendry imagines a world where Arya is safe, and loved, and happy. He just doesn't imagine that world including him.





	

Gendry imagines a world where Arya is safe, and loved, and happy. Usually, he imagines her back in Winterfell, far, far, away from all this horror. He’d heard tales of snow, magical water that floats through the air, Arya says it’s beautiful. Not that she could remember having ever seen it herself. So he imagines her home in Winterfell among the snow banks. 

He’d met her Lord Father once. He whispers it to her one night when she’s crying. She held him too tightly a small hiccup dying on her lips, “he would have loved you. You’re strong and loyal and stubborn: like a Stark.”

It’s the highest honor he’d received in his life, “I don’t think he liked me refusing to sell him my bull helm.”

“You’re wrong,” she mumbles sleep coming to take her, “you’re a fighter just like his best friend. Fighters live. We call it the wolves blood. I bet it was the highlight of his day.”

“Naw Arry,” he chuckles, “I’m sure that was all you.”

“You’re right,” she smiles against him, “I’m pretty awesome.”

He imagines Ned there too after that: Lord of Winterfell. Gendry thinks he could trust the man to spoil Arya the way she deserves. And boy does she deserve it. Some nights on the road are so long and hard that he thinks she might wither and waste away to nothing. He asks her if they had big feasts at Winterfell.

Her eyes light up and she nods her head enthusiastically, “last time we had one I flung mashed potatoes at Sansa because she was making eye at- well anyway I had to go to bed early. But when we get there it’ll be great! And older now so we can probably stay up the whole time even.”

“I would like that,” he says softly though he knew he’s destined for the wall. And that night he imagines the mighty halls of Winterfell and a simple bowl of mashed potatoes.

They’re lying in a barn when she crawls on top of him. He’s about to protest when she complains, “I can’t sleep, it’s not comfortable.”

“”It’s straw,” he says like it’s obvious, “you should be grateful it’s not the floor. I’m sorry m’lady, would you prefer a featherbed.”

She hits him for that and hisses, “I’m not a lady… and yeah I would, but I’ll just have to settle for you lumpy ass now won’t I?”

“Guess so,” he sighs resigned hoisting her up to lie on him. Within minutes she’s lightly snoring and brushes his fingers through her chopped locks. She deserved pillow beds. She deserved being called a lady. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve smelly barns and hacked off locks. Try as he might though he couldn’t imagine him looking any other way.

After Yorren dies she whispers to him about the other men of Winterfell they’d lost. He tries to imagine them, but he knows he’s doing a poor job. In his mind, they’re just faceless mashups of the men he used to forge for. 

He can picture Jon though: her bastard brother with the blue eyes and dark hair, the one who made her Needle. Her sword was gone now. Gendry supposed he’d have to make her a new one… if he ever got the chance. She loved to talk about Jon though. One time she even asks if Gendry thought it possible that him and Jon could share a mother, given how similar she found them.

“I wish I was your brother,” he says his eyes distant and his brow furrowed; “I could live at Winterfell with you then. We could hunt together and ride together and I could see all those wonderful things you’re always talking about. It must be nice… to be a Stark.”

She gives him a long considering look and the tilt of her head before shaking it as if to clear her thoughts, “no, I don’t want you to be my brother. You can do all that stuff anyways. Theon’s not my brother and the gods know he does. Besides, if you were my brother you’d leave me someday, like Jon did.”

He likes to think of her kind and honorable bastard brother visiting her often. He even likes to think of her brother who wasn’t her brother at all helping her cause a bit of mischief around the halls. It’s raining at Harrenhall and she’s whispering names, it’s a new thing but he doesn’t question it. They all have their coping mechanisms.

She watching him again, watching the sweat roll down his muscular body, he doesn’t ask her what she’s thinking. Even if he did he doubts she knew herself. She’d look at a Lord like that someday, he thinks. He decides the Lord who courts her will be kind, and gentle, and a lover of little wild things. The man he hopes lives close to her home so she never has to leave again. He doesn’t tell her this though, he knows she wouldn’t understand. 

She tells him of her direwolf and he imagines it to be something fierce, something to be reckoned with. No man would dare to threaten Lady Arya Stark in its presence. It’s a nice idea. 

He doesn’t think he’ll go to the wall anymore; he’s not sure where he’ll go. But for now, he’s with her… and Hot Pie. They’re headed North though and he reassures her they’ll get her home. If only so that one of them can get a happy ending. Arya doesn’t like that, he knows she doesn’t, doesn’t make it any less true.

Her mother’s a Tully she tells him, with red hair like Sansa. Her brother Robs like Jon… if only a little more full of himself. Rob and Theon are best friends. She hopes they get married someday. He tells her it doesn’t work like that. She asks why. He doesn’t know the answer so instead he settles on just being grumpy the rest of the day.

Arya thinks all these rules are silly. She says her aunt would agree with her. She too was a she-wolf. Gendry means to agree. Instead he says, “your aunt is dead.”

She’s mad at him for a whole hour before he gives her his rabbit and all is forgiven.

Her clothes are worn through… and there’s no denying she’s a girl now. Was there ever? He teases her relentlessly and her cheeks turn an angry red. He asks her about her favorite color, mayhaps he might be able to steal her a dress at some point. Arya says she’ll wear a dress when he sews her one. He smiles, “well then, I guess I’ll just have to learn to sew.”

“You can’t sleep with me,” he grumbles as she’s practically trying to crawl under the back of his shirt.

Her icicle fingers make him jump, “but I’m cold.”

“You’re not a little girl anymore,” he whines but turns around and slings an arm over her anyways, “I swear to every god there is, if you keep me up with your whispering I’ll end you.”

He's quick to sleep though and doesn’t hear her whisper a thing. Not even, “love you too.”

Life without Arya isn’t life at all. As he lays on the floor of the dungeon he prays his death is swift. He hopes the Brotherhood is kind to her. He hopes Winterfell is like he dreams. He hopes she’s together with her mother and Rob again soon. A tiny part of him hopes that this one last time she’ll come back for him.

She doesn’t.

He left her first he realizes as Davos sits there talking to him. The Onion Knight. He could laugh. All those times, all those nights, he’d imagined Arya warm and safe and happy. Never once had he imagined her with him. Never once had he imagined those things for himself: the bastard son of a king.

He imagines her on the sea. She would love it, he knows she would. He’s afraid of the water… afraid of drowning. She’d be fearless he knows. 

He needed her: like a fish needs water or flowers need the sun. By day three he realized that. But by now she’d be happy in Winterfell. Happy the way he always imagined her being. She was happy with me, a selfish part of him thinks. But it’s not true. She was home sick. So in his mind, he lets her go home to Winterfell… without him. As she always should have.

They say the King of North is dead. His mother and his men gone with him. All slaughtered by the Freys. Some even say the young princess Arya was at the wedding. Gendry didn’t imagine her at Winterfell anymore. Winterfell belonged to the dead. And Arya could be anything, anything at all, just not that.

So Arya, he decided, had escaped. Sometimes on the back of her direwolf, sometimes on foot. She was an adventure now, like him. She could go beyond the wall or to Essos, anywhere her heart desired. She was like one of those storybook heroines she admired so much. He fancies if he ever sees her again he’ll ask if he can go along too.

He meets Jon. 

Jon is not a boy… then again neither is he. And it forces him to realize that wherever Arya is now, she is no longer the girl he pictures. The weight of that knowledge threatens to crush him.

“I knew your sister,” he says the words flying out of his mouth unbidden, “she’s strong, and brave, and loyal. She loved you very much.”

“And what were you to her,” Jon asks looking at the man before him whose built like an ox. 

Gendry smiles fondly, “just a stupid bull-headed boy.”

Gendry often asks Jon of Winterfell, interjecting when his descriptions didn’t match the way Arya described them. In return, Jon often asked about Arya, to which Gendry would always much up his words about.

It’s Danny who says it, what they’ve all been thinking, “you really loved her, didn’t you?”

It confuses him but eventually he shrugs, “she’s the only family I have ever known.”

He sees her again. She’s not the girl in his dreams, she something else. He means to say something funny or romantic or at least apologize. Instead he scrunches up his face, “your hair.”

“Your face,” she shoots back before laughing, “I see you found Jon for me.”

“Yep, all part of the plan,” he lies scratching the back of his head.

It’s just like old times.

Sometimes he imagines they’re in love. Arya calls him stupid while lying beside him, “we are in love.”

“I know that,” he says though he doesn’t, “just sometimes I wonder if this has all been some weird fever dream. Like maybe I’ll just wake up back in flea bottom or on that damned row boat.”

“Not without me,” she pinches him, “if I wake up a little girl again there’s going to be hell to pay.”

“Yes, my lady,” he laughs quietly soothing her arm.

“Really though,” she asks quietly, “did you ever picture it? Lord Gendry?”

He snorts, “naw, spent too much time picturing Lady Arya playing in the snow in Winterfell.”

“Snow is overrated,” she teases nuzzling him with her nose, “I prefer the rain, it really brings out the smell of the hearth.”

He looks around the forge sheepishly, “would you like me to carry you to your featherbed, my lady.”

“No,” she smiles sleepily playing with the hairs on his chest, “I used to picture this, you know?”

“What,” he asks confused.

“Lord Gendry,” she teases, “I wanted to be outlaws, thought about spending the rest of my life sleeping on hay stacks with you.”

He snorts, “you hate hay.”

“Fine, sleeping on you,” she pokes him, “I always knew- if you were a Lord- it was the only way I was ever going to be a lady. Who else would let me be me?”

“Wouldn’t have been a Lord in Winterfell,” he points out.

“Rob was King,” she says sheepishly, “I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to get what I wasn’t.”

“You little weasel,” he laughed, “you tricked me into a Lordship.”

“Mmmhhhmmm,” she hums, “you imagine anything else in that pretty little head of yours?”

“No,” he says confused, “think the Gods have granted us all the happiness they’re capable of giving.”

“Not all,” she kisses him. It’s sure but neither soft nor wild as he imagined it’d be, “I’m thinking Vinsenya for a girl and Lommy for a boy.”

“We are not naming our child after Lommy Greenhands,” he says in horror before he brain catches up, “oh, you want a baby?”

“Blue eyed and dark haired like his father,” she kisses him again, “you can teach him to weld and I can teach him to fight. We can take trips to Dorne and Winterfelll and High Garden. Can you imagine?”

“Rob,” he suggests trying to think through her kisses, “for your brother.”

“Everyone will think it’s for your father,” she corrects, “Jaqen?”

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” he huffs, “Syrrio?”

“Eddard,” she counters.

He shakes his head. Thinking of her poor brothers dead baby, “Jon?”

“Jon,” she laughs, “he’ll be pleased to hear we were talking about him during-”

He’s tickling her, “don’t you dare.”

Whatever imagined, however he thought their lives would turn out, nothing he picture would ever compare to this.


End file.
